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Sunday, June 7, 2009

Many people have heard of RAM and disk images used in Linux, but did you know you can do the same with Solaris 10? Well, it's a little known fact, but you can, it is excellent potential for the use of Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris on embedded devices or even in safety devices such as firewalls.

Here is a quick method (courtesy of Peter Buckingham in one of our internal aliases) in creating a RAM disk image under Solaris 10 for x86/x64 or OpenSolaris x86/x64:

1. Install Solaris on a system disk 2. Tar it 3. Edit /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc and eliminate "bootpath" 4. Edit /lib svc/method/fs-usr and change mountfs to remount / instead 5. Edit /etc/vfstab and - A change rootfs to /devices/ramdisk: a - Remove swap - Remove /tmp so it's not swapped back 6. Now use the /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive command to build the RAM disk image:

For example:

# /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive pack solaris.img <directory>

where: <directory> Is the directory where you have your working file system

Now you have a RAM disk image, there is nothing really to stop loading the network through pxegrub/pxelinux, or from a local disk.